To build a thriving and successful Station, you must attract ever increasing
numbers of visitors to it and gently relieve them of their hard earned
cash. Occasional bonuses can be scored from medical emergencies, reforming
criminals, religious conversions, passing groups of tourists and pilgrims
and trading with merchant vessels. At the same time, you must plug inefficiencies
in your economy by minimising your costs and recycling any junk or unwanted
material.

Energy

Startopia
uses an energy economy. e is used to power,
build and fund everything on the Station and is stored in an impressive
contraption
called an Energy Collector (left).
Each one of these stores up to 100,000e and
are the hearts of your Station - losing all of them results in a loss.
If
you opt for the violent solution against rival Administrators, either
capture the segment with their last Collector in it or just blow the
device away for that decisive victory. The size of the floating glob
of mercury in the middle shows how full your Collectors are: when they're
down to a pinprick you know you're in trouble. Increasing e storage
means building or capturing more Collectors. However, regardless of
the number
of Collectors you have, you'll still only collect the same amount of
energy during a Solar Flare event in the game.

Energy and matter are interchangeable. Startopia borrows heavily from Star
Trek and gives you a Transporter to beam stuff to and from the
deck. Running in the background is a Matter Replication system that
uses e from your account to conjure up the necessary
cargo, supplies and requested facilities to build if the right crates
aren't available. The Transporter system has a Pattern
Buffer that
can hold up to ten items. Anything that is dead or inorganic can be
plucked off the deck and stashed here. This system is indispensable
for editing and rearranging your station, cleaning litter, potting
plants, and especially good for neutralising bombs.

e is automatically used to replace anything you
run out of: building materials, cargo crates, and electrical power for
Station facilities. If you ever run out of something don't fret - the
Station is now digging into your energy reserves to replicate the missing
supplies - provided you actually have sufficient juice in the bank, of
course. Using cargo is really all about Station efficiency and maximising
your profit ratios, not a matter of life or death. Although if you do
let you energy levels drop, you will certainly feel the pinch. Using
straight e for everything will almost certainly
keeps you poor early on. You're far better off using the right supply
crates in the long run.

Power

Collectors
only store energy; electrical power still has to be generated to actually
run the Station. The amount of e in your account
also doubles as an energy rating: if, for example, you have 50,000e,
that counts as 50,000 power points being "generated" every second. If
the collective power rating of all your Station infrastructure seriously
exceeds what's currently in your account, blackouts will occur: various
buildings and rooms will start to shut down. So, to increase your power
rating you need to build Energy Boosters (right)
everywhere, preferably near vital buildings if things get tight. During
a power squeeze, buildings are allocated power according to how close
they are to a Booster, so set up these small machines near important
facilities on both lower decks.

So power isn't that literal. You won't see your e slowly
dribble away when you build a few rooms and start using power. All a
Booster does is up your "power rating" by 20 000e when
it runs. Each Booster charges 25e per half minute
when they're running (depending on how hard you've set the economy) so
they will eventually start to get expensive when you install large numbers
of them. You're better off in the long run investing in a few more Collectors.

Power Failures

Running low on cash is basically the same as having a power crisis.
Every building - including the Boosters - will start to power down automatically,
and the lighting literally goes into the red. Going deep into debt utterly, utterly paralyzes
you - everything will shut down! There's nothing worse than desperately
trying to get back on your feet - difficult when nothing runs, no one
can be rehired and nothing can be recycled or restarted since you simply
have "negative" e. Basically, you are fucked at
this point until you can demonstrate some administrative true grit and
claw your sorry arse out of trouble before your head is served up on
a plate. Some hints: filling the Recycler with
trees, corpses, or even buildings and furniture, can scrape you through.

Power Disasters

Catastrophic power failures are usually the result of warfare gone
horribly wrong - the actual power failure itself can make it almost impossible
to field any enemy action. About the only way out of this situation is
to pray that Arona will want to buy some of your goods (most likely a
sacrificed building, cargo, entire Bio-Deck forests - anything!).
Just bear that in mind when you sally forth to kick heads next door.
A rich, powerful Station Administrator can become a drooling economic
basket case in no time! Casualties in a fight (or any kind of fatality
on your turf) results in a 1000e payout per death
to the next of kin. Losing armies of Station staff in a fight not only
rapidly drains your energy but takes out your best medics, Recycler workers,
communications and security personnel right when you need them most.
As you can imagine, striking successfully into enemy territory can be
devastating, but fraught with risk.

This
may irritate control freaks who like their numbers, but there's not a
single visible rating or bar graph anywhere in the game, other than a
few global ones found in a few menus. You sort out your power needs -
like everything else in the game - by feel. There is one graph you need
to keep an eye on, and that's the horizontal indicator under your numeric
e display. This shows the "efficiency" of your part of the Station in
energy terms. Full green means you have a large surplus; red means you
are starting to get dangerously low and blackouts are looming. Building
Boosters and Collectors will up your efficiency rating. 100,000e may
seem a lot to start with, but its easy to blow your budget and stall.
If you're used to complete and total control over your gaming you'll
find the indirect management nature of Startopia frustrating during a
crisis. Like any real time strategy game, you still have to develop your
economy and infrastructure in stages, and keep some spare fat in the
system, just in case.

Unchangeable or rigid Buildings, such as Space
Inns or Lavatrons,
consume a pre-set amount of power. Resizable or adjustable Rooms
like Berths, Sick Bays or Discos are charged per square of floor space.
On top of that each piece of furniture also eats up a little power, so
making a huge room and stuffing it to the gunnels with furniture will
eat into your power rating more than a sparsely furnished small one.

Recycling

One way you can get a little back from what you've foolishly spent is
to recycle any old junk, litter, crates, buildings and even corpses. The
Recycler converts any matter dropped into its hopper back into e and
shoots the result back to your Energy Collector via a cute little ray
gun affair sitting on top. The process isn't perfect and only 25% of
the
building cost of the recycled item, but a little is a lot better than
nothing.

Each Recycler is manned by a crew of up to four Salt
Hogs. Its wise to have extra workers per building so you can run
constant shifts without wearing out your workforce. These machines
are completely automatic - or rather, their productivity depends on
the performance of your workforce. With a gang of Scuzzers prowling
the Station collecting litter and emptying bins, or by beaming it directly
into the Recycler's tray yourself if you're really desperate, you can
just hang in there by your fingernails if e is
perilously low and you're struggling to acquire any Boosters. If worse
really comes to worse, you can sacrifice a whole building and all its
furniture to the Recycler to gain some urgent cash. Or some trees from
the Bio-Deck. However, the e won't become available
to you until the Salt Hogs have processed it. And watch out - criminal
Hogs pocket the recycled e for themselves!